Many people are interested in the GPU mining market but lack the knowledge on setting up a GPU mining rig.This guide will help you to choose the proper graphics card, find suitable mining software, and select a profitable pool that will benefit your personal mining goals.GPU mining isn’t that difficult once you know what all goes into setting it up.Once your miner is up and running, you barely need to do anything with it to keep it profitable.The first part of setting up your mining rig is choosing the proper hardware.Although you could use a CPU or an ASIC device for mining, this article will be focusing on GPU (graphics card) mining.AMD creates their graphics cards with an infrastructure conducive to mining, but Nvidia cards get exceptionally low hash rates making them a terrible choice for mining.The best Nvidia graphics cards yield less than half a megahash.Laptop hardware is even worse for mining than Nvidia cards are, so you’ll need a desktop system to mine.Having a desktop system allows you to keep your hardware properly cooled as well.

The graphics card or cards need to be able to fit your motherboard, and your power supply must have an adequate number of PCI-E connectors.Before settling on your graphics card, keep that in mind.To keep your system cooled properly, you can remove the cover from the case to allow for better heat dissipation.That is called an “open-air rig.” If you point a floor or box fan at your system, or have it near an air conditioner, you can make your rig run even cooler, providing longevity and potentially better hash rates.So, in summary, here’s what you need to look for to create an optimized GPU mining rig.GPU mining software is what makes your miner a miner.You could use cgMiner (no longer supports GPU mining despite its name) or BFGMiner directly, but to make things exceptionally easy, a front-end to the console is a great choice.cgWatcher is a program that provides a front end to cgMiner.cgWatcher offers a much more powerful interface, but we’ll be working with MultiMiner for its simplicity.

MultiMiner interfaces with BFGMiner, and when you run the program for the first time, you’re walked through setting everything up.It downloads BFGMiner and even locates proper mining cards attached to your rig and automatically configures them.Unlike cgWatcher, MultiMiner offers remote management and monitoring for free and instead of using software to provide this functionality, it uses a web interface so you’ll always have it with you wherever you have an internet connection.In order to finish setting up your mining software, you’ll need to enter pool information.There’s already an article about choosing a profitable mining pool, so review that article and create an account with a pool you like the best.Enter your URL and worker information into the MultiMiner wizard.Once you’re at the main interface for MultiMiner, click the “start” button or tweak other settings as you see fit.If you get a message saying that none of the pools can be used, check to make sure that you’ve entered your full worker name.

You may enter command line options manually through MultiMiner’s advanced settings menu for your GPU.Did you find this guide useful?If you’d like to read a guide on something else, please let me know what you’d like to read about by leaving a comment.When I got into Cryptocurrency for the first time, I started by trying to mine litecoin from a pool.I used Guiminer with a stock CPU and ATI 5450.With GUIminer it was very easy to get things running with my stock CPU but I was having the worst time trying to get the 5450 configured to run properly.alexandria bitcoinAfter much tinkering and crashing, I found that I could only mine about 14 KH with this crappy card, but didn’t mind because it was a learning experience for me overall.bitcoin etf effectThese were the stumbling blocks for me when getting setup off the ground: Not knowing how to use the underlying software CGminer and BFGminer.bitcoin mining hardware black arrow

I was instead trying to use Reaper (which to this day, I still cannot use) Not understanding how to use Memclocks, Gpu Engines, Thread Concurrencies, and Intensity settings to tune the card.Those facts, paired along with the desire to roll with Sha256 Asics for Bitcoin mining, put my desire to mine scrypt coins on the backburner.I did make the move to pickup an Alpha-T (a Scrypt Asic mining unit) in January (feeling disadvantaged now with the whole KNC offering 3x+ the mining power for the same price), so as a backup to this plan in addition to wanting to ‘learn the basics for sure’ I decided to move forward with buying an 8 GPU card rig to try my hand out at mining scrypt one last time.bitcoin tax trackerI have to say that the learning curve was definitely high – but due to the fact that by the time I started tuning the setup I already had experience setting and using Asic hardware from the command line level with both DOS and Ubuntu Terminal, so it was a little bit easier but here were my hurdles on the 2nd go round: I had to deal with a broken power supply at first which really caused me to 2nd guess my connections and setup when I didn’t need to.dogecoin shop

There were many times where I tuned the cards too high so that they performed correctly at first, but then shut down within 2-15 hours whereas now I have them running stable forever non-stop between 4-5.5 MH (I haven’t confirmed, but I think this happens due to the nature of mining on a coin switching pool – as I’ve outlined on my Multi-mining Roundup Review Earlier this year.They should be running an easy 5-5.6 MH from my own trial and error).enjoybit bitcoinAnd yet after all this, I’M STILL NOT SATISFIED WITH MY MINING PERFORMANCE!!!ethereum target 2017I see that sometimes, like now, the miner is no longer accessible via the web interface but that it is still running and quite reachable via SSH…hmm.litecoin and wikiI also tried to combine my original Frankenmint Rig shown below to work on one of the motherboards attached to this rig.bitcoin hourly investment

I see that it turns on and runs for maybe an hour then it shuts off the Asics running for no explainable reason.The Asics used to run flawlessly on my prior setup, but no dice this time : ( Here is my quick rundown of tips that I give to you for configuring your own Scrypt Rig: Use Powered Risers – DO NOT use Molex to 6pin PCIE to power your GPUs as you will melt these connectors Use a PSU that is only run between 60-80 % of expected load at most – less wear and tear will ensure your gear will reach MTBF (laymans terms:  it wont break as fast) I am using a 1500W PSU to power 4 OC 7950 GPU Cards, Motheboard, CPU, and RAM Use USB thumbdrives with a loadable mining distro like PiMP or SMOS linux.These are free Linux mining operating systems and will load on a $10 dollar 8 GB USB Key – smaller form factor and less power is drawn from a Bootable USB than an actual hard drive.Start from stock settings and slowly increase performance on the scale of Days – that means, Change your settings, and make sure they run stable for 2-3 days before pushing your cards further.

My own order of importance from Most important to Hashrate to least important:  Intensity, GPU Clock, Mem Clock, Power Tune, Thread Concurrency.I will rarely mess with Power tune or Thread Concurrency and will only mess with GPU Clock and possibly Memclock after I’ve already tuned down the Intensity to 18 – I will begin my tuning with my intensity all the way up with my GPU and Memclock settings set to ‘0’ which will set your GPU to “best fit” settings – they seem to put me at about 500 KH per card when I run it this way, but I have been able to get an easy 620 KH per card with proper tuning.Currently: I’m running Intensity of 20, GPU engine of 900 MHZ and Memclock of 1250 for a stable 550 KH.… I have ran it up to 1080 GPU Engine and 1300 MHZ on memclock and it seemed to work great for 6 of the 8 cards – Will likely be setting the rig back to these settings there is an update to PiMP.Use Config Files – Don’t duplicate values for multiple cards if they are to be the same across all cards, for instance, setting Intensity: “20”,  on the config for 4 cards is the same as setting Intensity: “20,20,20,20”  Just save your time and only do this for settings where one GPU needs different values.